Assimilation
by volitaire
Summary: The Master wakes up regenerated and disoriented in a 21st century slum somewhere in Britain, immediatley following his assassination aboard the Valiant and subsequent creamation. He is uncharacteristically mellow to the point of submission.
1. James Dean

-1He thought it was utterly and nonsensically beautiful, the subtle acts of masochism humans committed on a daily basis.

Cigarette smoking, for instance.

'Cancer sticks'. How much more spot-on could you get?

Oh, and _heroin_, that was a painstakingly slow suicide, it even disturbed _him_…but he loved the concept. During those intermittences when he found himself in seedy neighborhoods, dragging his feet past deteriorating crackhouses, he was too humored to lower his eyes. The humans were addicted to demise. Their useless, ravenous stares and clammy skin on skeletal frames furthered his benefaction. Junkies: hopeless, clueless, and worthless.

…But of course that applied to humans in general. They were doing themselves a favor, stabbing themselves with needles, trapping themselves in slums and filth; fucking- _breeding_- enslaving themselves in the task of remaining uneducated. Or unclean. Or diseased. Or self-detrimental…preferably all of the above. Those subtle acts of masochism doubled and tripled in harrowing numbers- all the more he didn't have to do to defeat the human race. They were doing it all themselves.

He'd thought about this each return trip to Earth. It was a lovely vacation- a nice way to simmer, walking through ghettos and watching failure reach its zenith without him having laid a finger on anyone.

He regained consciousness in a ghetto (between a ripe-smelling dumpster and a rusty banister). Not the friendliest of neighborhoods, but it took his mind off his predicament and the motels were cheap. He'd immediately needed shelter and a place to think. For eleven pounds per night, he got all that and basic cable television.

…He liked to watch news programs.

He was amused by the anchormen and women- such earnest liars they were- sitting rigidly behind briefing desks, squawking away. Their closeup-worthy, bleached and wicked smiles flashed as they transmitted propaganda from teleprompters, reading it to the masses but never comprehending, never caring, never thinking twice about the endangered icecaps, their gaping ozone, the sex offenders prowling neighborhoods, mudslides, landfills, global terrorists, epidemics spanning continents, the shift in weather patterns, rape, inadequate health care, elitist greed, oil revenue, vicious hurricanes, instigated warfare, domestic homicides, or genocides shrinking countries.

The continuing slaughter of the human race all condensed into statistics before the commercial break.

His work here was accounted for.

Their so-called progress was rewinding and unraveling with every new advancement, and that was on a large scale.

He had nothing left to do but sit back and encourage it all.

He decided to take up smoking himself, as an appetizer. If he was going to hide among them and appear convincingly ignorant, he'd latch onto the common argument that if a cigarette dangled from your face on an incessant basis, you were… _cool_. Even if he was a few decades late with the whole 'James Dean' aura, and that by now humans were waking up to the fact that things such as lung cancer were concurrent with the habit. He had a bypass respiratory system, and besides, humans were a _few million years _late of catching their initial mistakes. Whatever happened to nipping it in the bud, eh? More secondhand carcinogens puffing out from his lips and into their death toll.

On that note, he decided to buy a leather jacket too. Since he was "the Master of All Things" he could demand a little respect via skinned livestock at emporium prices.

It was his first week in a new body, and although the regeneration spiked his dynamism, the lewdness of the species he was bent on eradicating was inescapable buzzkill. Why oh _why _did Time Lords resemble homo sapiens? _Why_? That was just belittling, to say the very least.

It made him desperate.

This new body wasn't even handsome. He was embarrassed to take it shopping, but he wanted to stifle his hankering for a leather jacket- a tailored one, black, menacing.

He obviously needed to look the part, if he was going to settle in and play reaper.

A few minutes earlier, after he'd pried himself away from the depressing (exhilarating?) news and the telly, he'd emerged into daylight for the first time in days. He wandered, dazed and aimless, to a petrol station where he'd coaxed clerk to hand over a pack of Marlboros. They were masculine cigarettes by nature, tightly packed tobacco (like that mattered), affiliated with the wrangler lifestyle, though, he thought cowboys were silly. They tried too hard to be macho with their dusty swagger and impractical pointed boots. However, if it weren't for cowboys, there would be no cows roped in to make the jacket he so senselessly needed to purchase for himself. He chuckled at the absurdity of that thought, situated a cigarette between his fingers, and continued his walk, gaiting stiffly, like a newborn. He was a newborn, in a way.

He determined he was in England somewhere, presuming the mush of consonants and peaks of vowels around him was of Anglo-Saxon dialect. Wales, maybe? The shop signs mounted around him were written in English, and people bumped shoulders rudely enough in passing to constitute some type of British busybodied-ness. He stood his ground halfway between a street corner and a postbox, adjacent to a two-story bookstore paneled with imitation cedar. Behind him was a small town's answer to a department store, and the bustle of a fairly large population. His instinct and his observations told him it was the 21st century, and the street sign told him "North Main".

He was in The Center of Town, Somewhere.

He had not yet turned around to give his new regeneration a proper inspection in the department store glass (nor had he fully considered what had happened after his assassination aboard the Valiant).

Gut feeling told him his chin was too elongated and his jawline too angled. Fear and cowardice told him not to consider the physics and faith in why he had regenerated. Not yet.

Hopefully not ever.

What he knew?

He was back, again.

He was livid, again.

He was dizzy, he had a cigarette but no lighter, and he wished to purchase a jacket.

He took a few puckish strides and reclined against the postbox. Squinting up into the midday atmosphere, he tried not to feel subjugated. Detestation and disgust were hammering his insides, although any sociopath intuitions were locked down. He felt tough, but that was it. He was enveloped in a strange serenity- though not by choice- and he certainly had not escaped the thirst for conquest and annihilation. Perhaps he was just too proud with the overall regression of the human race. He'd only been on Earth for short of four days, but he'd been laying low, soaking it in. Maybe this point in time preceded the performance phase. Humans were lab rats to him, he'd benefit from watching them scramble through their maze of an existence.

He was tired; significantly, he was a fugitive. He'd have to run this rat race for a while (longer than four days, anyway), at his own expense, as long as he didn't reencounter the Doctor. He was mortified, though not disgraced, since the Doctor _still _had not won, and that _bitch _of a companion Lucy…curse the very thought… had not succeeded in whatever mental tangent had compelled her to shoot him in the stomach.

Suddenly, his mind splits and the Time Vortex sears into his thoughts-- whirling, dazzling, nauseating, bright- depth, and darkness, pulsating- soothing, spellbinding, shrill and yawning- the pounding, infinite fear abolished only by his clumsy footing reacting to the trauma image induces.

His heel slips off the curb, and the rest of his body reacts with windmilling arms and not enough cognizance to realize he's falling. His hipbone bangs against the postbox and his backwards tumble is thwarted by the sound of his shoulder blade hitting the pavement.

Passerbys gasp and stagger and then understand they should rush to his aide.

The drumbeat that had mercifully avoided his psyche for the past ninety-six hours suddenly thrashes into rhythm, warping his vision, clenching his lungs, causing his temples to visibly throb.

He goes cross-eyed, tearing up, focusing on every moving molecule, watching electrons in orbit, protons colliding in brilliant trajectories, waves of illuminated physics equations dance and form whole miniature universes, stamping themselves across the subatomic makeup of the Good Samaritans crouching above his clumsy new regeneration. He can see into seconds, rip holes though minutes, sew together dimensions.

"Stupid git just fell off the curb! Ha! Must be drunk off his tits!"

Someone's hand is placed behind his neck, and he is lifted, situated into a sitting position in the road. The hand props him up against the shiny chrome bumper of a parked car. There is a watch on the wrist of the helping hand, and it speaks to him in grating ticks.

"Time is regimented here on Earth", it says, "time is easy to track. Time is contained. Time is allocated. It can be trapped: in clocks and in watches, and sundials, calendars and pendulums, chronometers, lustrums, chip scales, millenniums, hours, muons, nanoseconds. It is run on quartz, strapped to wrists and hung on walls. Time is readable. Time is _controlled_."

He remembers this, suddenly, and his hearts slow their panic. The drumming quiets but does not cease. The Vortex evaporates into the gold-plated face of the Milgauss Rolex waving in front of his blurry eyes.

"You alright, mate?"

Indistinct beeps of cell phone buttons alerting paramedics snag his concentration.

"No!" He snaps, putting his palms to the crown of his head. "No, don't call anyone, I'm fine. Godssake, stop, back up, all of you."

The Rolex, and the arm it is banded to, ascend up into the crowd, and the crowd comes into focus. A string of humans stand agape in front of the leather outfitter shop, several on their mobiles, some still stooping to his level.

All of them whisper.

Their whispering resonates and drills at his consciousness. The drumming resurfaces. He grabs his ears, but rather than muffle the sound, he traps it indefinitely, caging it inside his skull. His eyes close involuntarily. The drumbeat turns cyclical, then abstract, looping into quantum energy, an insurgent in the ether. Barriers of velocity and cosmos and psychokinesis are shattered.

He is vulnerable.

His existence is on the map.

He is a furious blinking blip on the radar of time and space.

He scrambles upright, jumping to his feet with unexpected agility. He waves his hands violently at the group of people in front of him and they separate in several spots, as repelled by one another and the Master's hasty recovery.

"Look, I had a fall, alright? Unfortunately for you that doesn't portend a concussion, and you're not lucky enough for brain damage either. Sorry I had to make a public embarrassment of myself- have a good laugh? Thought so, thank you kindly..."

His tempered sarcasm and ability to stand steadily on two feet seems logic enough for most of the people, and they wander off about their business, frowning. Some hesitate, flipping their cell phones closed slower than necessary, making the rudimentary askance checkup. Some laugh with an air of harassment, and someone even goes as far as to brush off the back of his t-shirt.

"You sure you're alright?" She asks, irresolute as to whether or not she should brush off the seat of his pants as well. She bends awkwardly at the waist with her head cocked up at him, hand suspended between the small of his back and his rump. She creates a grin, banking on sympathy and mockery simultaneously. He resists the urge to strike her.

He grunts and steps back onto the sidewalk, twisting away from her maternal fussing.

"What were you doing, anyway? D'ya need help getting home or anywhere?"

"I was shopping for a jacket, actually." Slips from his mouth, almost conversationally.

"What, in the road?" She asks, bearing a chuckle.

"No, _here_." He indicates, raising an involuntarily trembling hand to the store in front of them. He is answering her questions, unprovoked and just as mellow as he was minutes before. The fury and trepidation had evaporated, and even his now fatal dilemma is immobilized.

He was a target now, his mind was unguarded for anything with the power to gaze into it-"…I'm…Rose," The woman says to him, but distantly, at a whisper. She is staring fixatedly at the side of his face, herself threatening to waver straight off the curb. "Do I…_know _you?" She begins pacing a circle around him, leaning in, trying to catch an identity.

The Master, fighting to feel less placid, turns slightly towards her and she frowns, mouth opening and closing as she tries to connect and verbalize several thoughts. "I- I'm- Rose Tyler…do I…_know _you from _somewhere_? Sorry to bother you, but I'm certain I've seen you some-"

He looks at her full-on, and her eyes burn.

He steps backward, stumbles again, runs into a lamppost and slides to the ground, unconscious.


	2. The Vortex

The Master is comatose. His thoughts meander and invert.

His mind reaches into the past.

--To the Eve of War:

...He is chained.

Alone in a white room.

The ramparts of the Panopticon hum.

Outside the prison, Gallifrey is in disarray.

_Daleks._

Within the next seven days, the Citadel will fall under siege. The first fleet has breached the transduction barrier.

Atmospheric winds howl beneath the stratosphere. A ragged hole disrupts the calm orange sky, consuming the pressure of the cosmos beyond. Celestial debris filters downward from the heavens, swirling and luminous, sprinkling the mountains and the fields with a toxic and beautiful foreshadowing of the destruction to come. Stardust from the planet's neighboring systems powders the landscape. The highest of South peaks are speckled with fractions of the ozone, and the mountaintops begin to melt under a golden crusting.

The sight is bewitching and angelic.

The Master closes his eyes and strains against his shackles until his wrists bleed.

Coordinates are confirmed. Romana announces that The Emperor has locked his Eye on the Cruciform. The Eye of Harmony is condemned from interference and guarded. Bowships are prepped, idling uselessly in hangars.

"Apocalypse" is whispered across the Continent.

No orders are given to anyone.

Not yet.

The Deathsmiths of Goth hover above the tear in Gallifrey's defenses, proudly waiting to infect.

Gallifrey is paralyzed, staring up in wonder at the whole of Skaro on the horizon, robbing them of their moon.

The last nights of Gallifrey are starless.

------------------------------

The memory is overwhelming, and yet he cannot escape his unconscious state.

His hearts speed up, pounding in fear and anticipation. He can smell the Dalek fuselage backfiring as the primary Black Hole Carriers initiate attack.

The walls of his cell tremble.

He presses his forehead to the casement in the prison wall, transfixed. The battle outside is tame in its infant state, remising to time. A planet that can manipulate the progression of events is forced to a standstill. All efforts are too late. The very thing the Timelords harness has slipped from their control. Everyone is subject to fate.

Even him.

He watches the scene unfold, half cognizant.

He rocks on his heels, grips at his throbbing temples, stares powerlessly out.

A turbine cylinder spirals from thousands of feet above, whistling and sizzling downward, leaving a translucent airstream in its wake. Gravity cuts the rate of its acceleration, and for a dazzling millisecond it is suspended beneath the wounded force field, rolling lazily in the air, crackling and wheezing particles of Dalek technology in flaming specks. Then a direct staser sears through the inertia, fired by a sniper on a balcony of the Citadel. The rogue engine evaporates in a sonic flash, and all is silent again, save for the ominous and distant detonations from the battle miles overhead.

The Master is terrified.

Nineteen hours before, he had been resurrected.

'The Act of Master Restitution'. Displayed publicly- in a cage- on trial before the merciless descendants of Davros, gunstalks aimed. Abandoned by his people, under punishment for evil crimes.

The sentence:

_Extermination_.

Regeneration slips from ability. His life force disperses into infinity, divided and lost. Entwined in eternity.

There is no pain.

Just death.

Annihilation. Scattered, destroyed.

He is everywhere and nowhere, unfeeling, unexisting,

and then:

Gallifrey. The Panopticon. Hastily and greedily the Timelords oversee his resurgence. They reform his molecules, enhance them- incarnate in the Vortex- a foolish and desperate second chance; his spirit is recollected from perpetuity and The Master is reborn and rebound, with the sound of drums echoing in the background.

The Daleks descend and the first soldier of Time War is positioned for the front lines. Vortex energy whisps from his naked, trembling body, and vengeance courses through his veins.

Amnesiac, aroused, feral, drooling and terrified, he is taken from the capitol, strapped to a stretcher and locked away, high in the prison. Under maximum security, until the first cluster of ships advances. Now they will free him and let him fight.

Emissaries gather in the corridor outside, speaking hurriedly. He'd predicted their arrival.

He presses his hands to the glass and lets out a long, delusive, raspy scream. Keys jingle against the bars and The Master grinds against the wall, clawing, cornered. Glistening with sweat, deranged, his eyes roll back into his head, and he trembles, submitting to the unremitting drumbeat calling him forth.

The warden is not phased. War is upon them and there is no time for reconciliation.

The Master slides down the wall, wedging himself into the corner between the plank bed and the pane of glass, which is quivering from the increasing vibrations from outside. His jailers enter, marching routinely to retrieve their prisoner, trying not to glimpse the damage past the window. A wailing, white-hot beam from an N-Form streaks skyward and is frozen in time before reaching its target.

"_We will all suffer_." The Master wails, covering his face with his hands.

Seconds slow; The Master does not know if this is a deception of his own panicked mind or a consequence of the rampant fight ensuing.

Time stirs.

His keepers do not move to stop him running. No drone from Dalek vessels shakes his resolution. He snatches the keys, fumbles with the manacles, rips himself from the wall. Fear misguides his navigation, he runs amongst silver trees and burning skies. Anguish and insanity fuel his escape. A cluster of TARDIS', forsaken and half-drained of power in the panic. The Eye of Harmony is closing.

The Master shouts a destination and collapses.

The interstellar medium burns gently, slowly.

_Gallifrey._

A perpetual inferno. The firmament.

_They are no longer. _

Everything blazes.

The Schism subsides.

-----------------------

Two-hundred fifty million light years away, in an alternate universe, The Doctor reverses a separate breach in time and reopens another rift. The universe rights itself.

Rose Tyler too, dies, and is reborn, on the other side.

_Two rifts in time._

_-----------------------_

Now, the girl, Rose Tyler, kneels beside The Master.

He cannot see her, cannot hear her, but he can feel her presence. His mind perceives her as clearly as it perceives the relentless Vortex from which they both came.

_A division. _

Again, he was given new life, after passing into the very thing that he most feared.

His hearts thunder, and Rose fusses over his lifeless frame, pleading for him to please wake up.

She pounds her fists to his torso and stops suddenly, pressing her hands to both sides of his chest, feeling _two_, quickened, fearful heartbeats.

She gasps, chokes, cries out in disbelief, laying herself against the motionless Timelord, shaking him in all-out desperation.

"_Doctor_!" She cries, beside herself, "Doctor! It's _you_! You're _here_! Please wake up!"


End file.
